John Allen provides some context in understanding the growing number of stories related to clerical collaboration with Communist regimes:

As with the sexual abuse crisis in the United States, once the dam breaks, documents and accusations surface so rapidly that the media barely has time to record them, let alone sort through them carefully. In such an environment, elastic terms such as “collaboration” and “informant” tend to be recycled endlessly, giving a false impression of fixed meaning, when in fact every situation is different.

Herewith four cautions which, in an ideal world, would be packaged into every story on the current crisis – but which, under the twin pressures of time and space, are generally left unsaid.

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